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What is Google Analytics?

If you’re a website owner or administrator, you’ve probably heard about Google Analytics but may not know exactly it is or what it refers to. We thought we would provide you with some information on what it is and why it might be important to your online presence.

Google Analytics can be extremely useful to you when capturing your online audience. If you’re wondering what your visitors are looking for on your website when they visit, Google Analytics will take the curiosity out of this for you.

The basic steps for setting up to Google Analytics is to:

  1. Signup: Signup for Google Analytics here, by giving Google some basics about your website.
  2. Obtain and insert the tracking code on your website: Once you’ve signed up, you will get your JavaScript tracking code from Google, which you will need to place behind your website. Your website developer can assist you with this step by placing this in the code behind your website, or if your website is hosted with us, we can help you with this step. Sometimes some content management systems will even have a section that you can place the code into which will apply it to all the pages behind your website.

Once you have signed up and installed the code, within a few hours or so, the tracking code will gather data and break it down into useful information for you. You’ll get information on the following data and much more!

Days:

If you have been wondering whether your website gets most of its exposure on weekends or mid-week, wonder no more! Within Google Analytics, you will get a daily breakdown of everything your visitors do on your website. Daily breakdowns can be quite useful in instances where you are advertising discounts or promotions and are noticing that most of your visitors are viewing your website on particular days, so you can tailor promotions to take place on those days.

Website Visits/ Page Visits:

Firstly, Google Analytics will give you an analysis as to how many times a visitor has visited your website.

Secondly, it will also collect a run down as to how many visits particular pages are getting. If you can see that some pages are getting more clicks than others, you might want to use those pages to your advantage.

Bounce Rate:

Have you ever wondered whether a lot of people visit your website and then close it off after viewing one page? Google Analytics measures the percentage of visitors closing your website off after viewing it and opening another page. The lower the bounce rate, the better.

If you are starting to notice that you are getting quite a large bounce rate percentage, then it might be time to talk to your web designer, developer or marketing agent to try and improve your website and content. There are many things you can do to improve this. Sometimes just revamping your website design can lower your bounce rate, or implementing a blog and regularly updating this can help increase the time visitors spend on your website.

Average Time on Page:

This calculates the average time someone spends on various pages on your website. If you are noticing that people are spending more time on some pages than others, it might be worth taking note of what pages are capturing your audience more than others. For instance, if you are noticing that your gallery is really capturing your visitors, then it may be worth adding some additional images to other pages that viewers aren’t spending much time on. Taking the time to enhance imagery on these pages can help keep visitors on your website for longer, if your website is content heavy. This may be exactly the reason why visitors aren’t spending much time on other pages.

Location:

Google Analytics will track the location or geographical data of your visitors.

This will provide you with a breakdown for: State, Country and City, which is based purely off the location of the IP visitors are using to access the internet. If you aren’t selling online all over the world and are just trying to target Australia but are noticing that a lot of your visits are coming from overseas, then you may like to look at improving the SEO and content on your website, to include location keywords for your business such as “Australia”, “NSW” or “Sydney”, etc and make sure you have/ get a .com.au web address.

Knowing this information can also help in instances where you’re selling products within Australia and want to start branching out and selling overseas but don’t know what country to target or how to tailor your content.

We can’t stress enough how important this is to your online presence. Google Analytics can also help you with SEM (Search Engine Marketing), essentially Google AdWords. You will be able to see what campaigns are doing well and which need extra work.